I recently had the chance to chat with Mason about my time at Conexus and my decision to pursue a new opportunity. You can check it out on any of the platforms here:
I have watched and read all of the great posts outlining the progress that we have made and ought to make around gender equity. It is important to get to a time when there will be no difference, real or perceived, in the opportunities available to both women and men. In Canada, we are not close to being there.
I am normally pretty optimistic about progress. We (society, business, etc.) usually evolve in a way that creates more hope, more optimism and better outcomes for all of us. The changes are never as quick as some would want but generally speaking, we progress in meaningful ways.
Community Social Responsibility (“CSR”) has evolved to a broader topic around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”) and/or Environmental, Social, Governance (“ESG”). I would suggest that this continuation has extended new, promising thinking and, therefore, expectations for businesses, governments and societies.
While the aspiration in these discussions helps motivate us, the raw data particularly as it pertains to gender equity in business is not very promising at all. In fact, a few recent data points stand out for me as troubling:
So, we know that the problem is real and we know that what we are doing today is not nearly good enough and won’t solve this problem in our lifetimes.
That said, let’s not give up. Let’s get together, get past the yelling and the shouting of social media and find ways to accelerate progress. Let’s make it the mission of more leaders to take accountability for how their organization can become gender neutral.
In our ongoing discussion and thinking about this at Conexus, we have had some successes and some “do differently’s” as we have explored this topic. I want to share a few observations in the interest of helping others and also in the interest of learning from others, who are better than we are in this area. If you have ideas that have worked in your business or industry, please comment on the blog for others to read and learn from.
Here’s a few observations from our Conexus journey in this area:
If building more diversity doesn’t appeal to your moral compass, it should most certainly appear to your financial one. Some McKinsey data correlates ethnic and gender diversity to financial performance and the conclusions are crystal clear and unambiguous.
The science about the impact that diversity has on business performance could not be stronger. The graph above shows that there are material differences in performance. I don’t know about you, but I am always interested when I can find ways to accelerate the performance of our organization. It might make you uncomfortable, but much like the blog topic from two weeks ago, the discomfort will lead to new learnings, growth and ultimately more progress. In fact, it might be one of the easier ways to accelerate performance of your organization.
What are the ways in which you have been able to materially change the gender equity in your businesses? I’d be interested in learning from you……
Eric speaks with host Dale Richardson about his life and career, including his family’s background and Saskatchewan roots; growing up in a military family and moving around Canada; how he got started in the financial and credit union world; his approach to leadership; the importance of failing forward and taking the time to THINK during the day; Conexus’s new headquarters in Regina; investing in Saskatchewan’s tech sector; and much more.
The Talking 306 Podcast is hosted and produced by Dale Richardson, and is a proud member of the Saskatchewan Podcast Network.
https://www.stitcher.com/show/talking-306-podcast/episode/eric-dillon-79811910
I have been watching the last few weeks / months with great interest. Election season is everywhere it seems. Where I live, we have just finished a provincial election, a municipal election is coming next week, there has been threats of a federal election and of course, there is the US election next week. I am not sure how Fox News and CNN intend to appear on the US ballot but they are surely trying 🤷♂️.
All those elections have rightfully dominated news, social media feeds, water cooler chats and of course, discussions with my colleagues, friends and even my kids. I am fascinated by politics. Not the stuff that makes all of us shake our heads, but rather the process to make change and bring policies forward that address the challenges we have today in our city, our province, our country and our world. I get to chat regularly with those elected to various political offices and I have asked several of them if they have a “take a friend to work day” and if so, I’d sign up right away. I’d love to see the inner workings of the process to create ideas, debate their merits and then turn the best of them into regulation, policy and laws. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I love to debate and at times, get very carried away with passionately exploring ideas. To be clear, that is the only interest I have in politics. The other parts of politics, I could do without, but I digress.
Watching the exchange of ideas lately has me wondering how we became such an “either / or” collection of humans, incapable of listening and exploring the ideas of others. When did it become such an (a) or (b) discussion? Did I miss a memo?!? I started to think about places where the “either or” discussion has allowed us to be less accountable to each other to work together, to learn and to solve real issues or exploit real opportunities. Here’s a few on my mind:
Climate Change -Clearly, the changing nature of our planet is something we all need to address. I had a chat with a young finance executive on Friday. We had good discussion about both the opportunity for financial institutions to participate more fully in the change but also the practical economic challenges for all of us to produce less emissions. It was an interesting discussion in which I felt like my own thinking evolved a bit while at the same time, I felt like I was able to share some views in different ways which he hadn’t considered. Watching this debate around the world, it has been reduced to a discussion about whether the world would survive the with only fossil fuels or how we should completely shut down any source of energy that produces emissions.
Gender Equity – I have written previously about my personal biases towards creating more gender balance in finance and business. I shared how my personal biases have created some interesting discussions with both men and women as I have lived these choices. I have also heard comments like “burn the patriarchy” communicated by some to highlight how frustrated and angry they are about the issue. I don’t pretend for a minute to argue validity of the frustration and emotion, but I do wonder how that emotion will get translated into a better tomorrow. I spoke in the blog above about a conversation with a male colleague and my regret at the missed opportunity to enrol him as an advocate for change. I believe the eventual outcome does lie in enrolling more advocates (both women and men) into this discussion and finding a better path forward.
Racism / Black Lives Matter – I watch the media reports and see demonstrations on both sides of this issue. The demonstrations can be violent and hurtful. I am reminded of Charlottesville and feel like I am watching the ugliest part of humanity. Conversely, when I attended the large BLM rally in my community earlier this year, I was moved by the optimism and by how much the conversation had changed to a “we” discussion from an “us/them” discussion. An “and” discussion versus an “either or”. I was more optimistic leaving that event than I ever had been as it relates to BLM and BIPOC.
Why have the debates / discussions become so unproductive and how do we create a better forum for engaged discussions, learning and solutions? What has been the catalyst for taking such complex discussions and reducing them to “either or” statements meant to incite emotion? Is it just the stress of 2020? Is the now 280 characters that social media forces us to make our arguments within? Is it that our frenetic, busy lives have caused us to “fire our statement out there” and then just as quickly move on and not listen or engage with anyone else in a really curious way? The challenge with this kind of emotionally charged “zinger” is that it creates less accountability in others to listen, like really listen, to your thoughts. They are easily able to dismiss them or argue back with a similar level of emotion. We just yell at each other. In essence, aren’t we letting them off the hock for having to really think about your view, to consider it against their own perspective and then to thoughtfully engage with you. Aren’t we just lowering the level of accountability to critically think about your view and give it the thought it deserves? Maybe you aren’t looking to debate your thoughts but then at the same time, don’t expect anyone else to do anything with it other than dismiss it completely as being different than their own.
HBR published an article a few years ago that highlighted the challenge for business leaders in managing paradoxes. Here were a few of the questions:
Isn’t the answer to all of these clearly “both”?
The article goes on to talk about how leaders must create a dynamic equilibrium in their minds to hold multiple ideas in their head while exploring each of them. A recent book I read, Loonshots, talks about loving the artists (the innovators) and the soldiers (the current do’ers) in the company equally. The book goes on to ensure that leaders are focused on watching for the P-type loonshots (there’s no way that could ever work – and then it does) and the S-type loonshots (there’s no way that could ever make money – and then it does) even though they are probably predisposed to one kind or the other.
Could you frame those social challenges above as absolute paradoxes in the same way?
Clearly the answer to these questions is again…..both, and….
The next time I am engaged in a discussion with a colleague about complex problems like this, I am going to try very hard to listen well, to hold space for their idea while I consider their views and compare it to my own before responding. As a leader, I get it…..it’s hard. Like really hard. I know that better than most and have failed miserably in trying to do this well all of the time. I would rate myself as a 6 out of 10 on doing this consistently well. My coach would tell me that the goal is to try and be a 6.5 next week and go from there. All of the circumstances (lack of time, high stress, social media, etc.) are true and hard to ignore but at the same time, the solutions of the future, will demand a much more curious exploration of ideas and new solutions that we haven’t found yet today.
For the business leaders reading this blog, good luck in raising the bar, if only a little, in managing the paradox and equilibrium that next week will bring.
For those elected and re-elected to office this election season, share your ideas broadly, listen closely and fully consider the ideas of others. Do what you can to thoughtfully explore the ideas different from your own that might help move us forward and solve complex problems. We are behind you following your lead.
Recently, I was asked to join the BC Young Leaders Group to participate in their annual conference this year. I am always honoured to be asked to hang out with the young, bright minds working in the credit union system. The energy in the room and the passion for the purpose of cooperatives is a great way to fill my cup for a few months.
Their conference is titled “Executing Innovation” and they specifically asked me to talk about things like:
I decided to call my presentation – Changing the “That Hasn’t Been Done Before” Mindset.
Here’s why 🙂
When I was in business school (both times), there was much discussed about how to “be competitive” and “measure” your success. The challenge was that the measurement or comparison was always against others in the industry. The measurements in banking were not that hard to figure out — return on equity, return on assets, assets under management, efficiency ratio, productivity, etc. In fact, I would suggest that if you look at the balanced scorecards of multinational banks, community banks you’d likely see much of the same. If you went further and examined financial cooperatives you might also be surprised to see a small collection of the most used metrics that describe success.
In the businesses cases that I worked on in school, the success of the fictional business was a measurement against peer groups or others that competed in the same “vertical” industry. Both the Professors and the Students continually made reference to “being competitive”, “chasing the competition” and “closing the gap”. In today’s world, we are bombarded with Google alerts, Twitter lists and hashtag mentions of competitors, that we then use to immediately compare and contrast against the businesses that we lead.
The comparisons don’t stop with the businesses we lead either. The comparison and chase extends to the leaders in those businesses. The gravity for each of us to look, feel and appear like others is palpable. We likely all have leaders in our lives that we admire or perhaps even want to be like. I am no different. There were and still are many leaders that I look up to and hope that one day I could grow and develop to be more “like them”. It’s fine if you aspire to achieve the leadership outcomes that other great leaders achieve. I want to be more patient, more open minded, a better listener and more of a catalyst type of leader. I know leaders that do all of those things exceptionally well and I admire them greatly.
But the chase is dangerous for leaders.
It’s one thing to want to be better as a leader or business and then look for examples of what better could look like in one area or another. But the development and growth of both the leader and the business has to be in the context of being a better version of myself (or itself for businesses). As I said above, I want to be more patient. But I cannot let the pursuit and growth of being more patient tear away at the passion that I know helps me to succeed. Here is where the challenge lies. If I admire the patience of other leaders and just look to re-create that for myself, I might wake up one day very different than the “Eric version” of the leader I aspire to be. It’s the same for businesses and the evolution of the businesses we lead needs to be the same. There are other businesses I admire as being super innovative. I want to create a more innovative credit union, but it has to be a more innovative version of Conexus not just recreate a version of Conexus that looks like a different business. If we did, we might wake up one day with a business that is not aligned to our purpose or strays from our values un-intentionally. I had a great mentor very early in my career that made this point to me in a very direct way:
“As you grow as a leader, you still need to be yourself, everyone else is taken”
I realized later that was originally an Oscar Wilde quote, but it resonates with me and I use it frequently with those I mentor and coach.
The chase is also dangerous for businesses.
I was at a presentation a few years ago by Youngme Moon. She was speaking about this very issue which was highlighted in her book Different. I vividly recall a picture she showed during the presentation. It was something like the one below and she asked the conference participants which one of these we were as a business and how will we create a sense of uniqueness in the mind of our customers and potential customers.
How would you position yourself if you were the CEO of any one of these products? I know when I buy water, I care about which one I see in the cooler, how it is packaged (recyclable or not) and the size of the bottle compared to my thirst. That’s it, that’s all. I also don’t want to be a leader in any of these businesses where the consumer cares so very little about the choice. I appreciate that finding a financial partner and buying water is different and personal finance is certainly more emotive, but it was a great reminder of why uniqueness matters.
It was a sobering question when you really think about how you create competitive differentiation in the cluttered mind of the consumer. It’s also a question about how you go about the growth and development of the business and the leaders within and the danger of the “chase”. There is tremendous gravity around the chase, and we all need to be careful about allowing it to pull us places we don’t intend to be.
If you have or develop a bunch of leaders that look like each other and those leaders look, act and talk like those that work in many other businesses in your industry, what are the chances of you creating something unique, special and distinct for those that you seek to serve, either as customers or as employees (customers of the leadership environment you create)?
Very small indeed.
It’s hard enough to create new ideas, new strategies and uniqueness in business. It’s harder yet unless you are completely aware and conscious of the gravity to “sameness” and think regularly about how to grow, develop, learn and create in the context of being unique and in the case of leaders, being themselves.
I was reminded of this early by the very same mentor when he said:
Be careful. If you chase the competition, you might just catch them. Then what?
May we all celebrate those around us (business and leaders) that are unique and revel in being themselves, first and foremost.
To the BC Young Leaders – see you in a few weeks 🙂
I posted earlier on my site about competitive advantage today being defined by the agility of an organization and the continuous speed with which is brings new value to the market. If you accept some of those arguments, then perhaps you will also accept that the new speed, iteration and “intrapreneurial” culture also brings the occasional “whoopsie” into the fray.
Most leaders I know would suggest that the organizations we lead are completely receptive to failure and that as leaders, we all support the tremendous learning and growth that comes from making mistakes. Sure we do 😂. If I hear one more musing about how you “miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” as encouragement for people to try new things, I might throw up in my mouth, if just a bit. I only say that because those kinds of things are so very easy to say, while at the same time, the experience that our employees have when failure actually occurs is not exactly as encouraging.
There has been much written about how organizations should respond to failure, harvest all the learnings, share those broadly and then go on to achieve unbelievable results as a result of the failure. Academics have long hypothesized about how the specific actions, body language, spoken/unspoken responses and behaviour of leaders all have a disproportionate and lasting affect on the those experiencing setbacks at work. Both positively and negatively. I have actually seen articles which would suggest that those initial, visible responses will have the single biggest impact on how these sorts of failures are digested by organizations and whether or not organizations truly learn and grow as a result.
That puts a lot of pressure on leaders and in particular on their own level of self awareness and self control. We all want things to work out perfectly and to succeed on things that matter. When they don’t workout that way, being in control of your emotions all the time is a hard thing to ask of anyone. For CEO’s, there is always more visibility and opinion on the choices you make and the consequence of choices. For me, when I make a mistake, I know there are 1,000 opinions on what I could have done differently. I offer that not to ask for any sympathy – I love my job and all that it brings. I offer it to demonstrate how hard it is to ask leaders to be perfect when it comes to admitting failure and really looking deeply for the lesson that exists within. It’s hard enough to admit defeat in a 1 on 1 conversation, it is infinitely harder for leaders to admit mistakes to the masses of people that count on them everyday. For that reason alone, it’s good to practice this level of transparency early in your leadership journey and graduate to admitting failure in progressively larger settings. You can get good at it, trust me, I have tried. Sometimes, I have done it well and other times, not so much 🤔.
Let me give you some real life examples
Organizational Design – Early in our journey to create more creativity and innovation in my current role, I had done lots of research on “ambidextrous organizational design“. I had grand ideas and made what was, at the time, very drastic organizational changes. The changes were very hard for the organization to digest. Our Teams could not connect “the why”, struggled with implementing the changes and to be candid, the changes were initially a bit of a disaster. I struggled with a long time to admit my failure in communicating, in researching and in listening better to the feedback I received at the time. Over the four years since then, we have slowly incorporated the learnings and are getting better at becoming more ambidextrous, but a more open admission of the failure at the time, I’m convinced, would have helped immensely. Missed opportunity for sure. #FacePalm.
The Fail Forward Awards – We revamped some of our internal recognition programs in the last few years and tried very hard to use this as an opportunity to drive home the cultural changes we wanted to make around creativity, innovation and accepting failure. We introduced a new awards category to our revamped programs that celebrated failures and importantly, incorporating the learnings from those missteps. We did a fantastic job of almost all of this work – except one thing. We had designed the program to allow you to nominate others in the organization for their failures. Read that last sentence again. OMG, yeah….oops. We quickly learned that was not the way to encourage people to open up publicly about failure and how they learned, grew and shared those learnings. We discovered the design flaw early, laughed at ourselves and the irony around failing forward on the “Fair Forward Award” design. Today, that program is one of the most hotly contested awards at our super cool, annual awards program and it is a real tangible way in which we are living our values as a learning organization. Quick recognition, transparent admission of an oversight, then a pivot to incorporate much better ways for people to share their own stories of setback, learning and growth and ta-dah, works much better. Easy right?!?
The better you get at demonstrating the vulnerability around your own imperfection / fears and the more courage you will build to allow you to share the learnings that come from mistakes. When people within the organization see leaders doing that regularly, it becomes so much easier for them to do it too. It also becomes less emotionally exhausting to lead others when you can leave your “I have to be perfect” backpack at home and just be yourself.
Inherently, people want to work for other humans – warts, flaws and all. The sooner we act more human and let go of perfection, the easier it is for others to choose to follow.
Quick update from a reader of the blog – Jill let me know there was a “Museum of Failure” showcasing failed ideas but created as a way for all of us to learn from these whoopsies. Check it out!